The StaffDel emerged from the Glum Mums confab looking like they'd been in an emotional Cuisinart. From there we were all stampeded into a meeting with the anti-Sandinista civil opposition. Actually, in our thirty-six hours in-country, we met with three groups of opposition politicians plus an opposition priest and an editor from the muffled opposition newspaper. After the real human-rights commission and the other human-rights commission and the mothers and the general mess in the streets, we should have been ripe for propaganda picking. We should have come back to the States loudly parroting the opposition line. The trouble is, I don't think any of us can remember what it was, not even the most dutiful of the note-takers. My own notes from the civil opposition meetings look like one of those cocktail napkins where you've written a drunken, coked-up, middle-of-the-night, brilliant movie idea. "Fr last 150 yrs Nic sit. nt ben conumdrs t. Nic people advismisng any po1. stabil," I have one opposition figure stating. These guys were so boring that I'm amazed they haven't all been hired as George Bush speech writers.
Each member of the opposition had a long rhetorical set piece blaming all of Nicaragua's past troubles on American intervention and all of Nicaragua's present troubles on a lack of it. This was always followed by a detailed account of the quarreling and infighting among the opposition parties, which seem to divide and multiply faster than salmonella bacteria in warm tuna salad-Liberals, Liberals With Hats, Christian Democrats Under 59", Conservatives Who Sing In The Shower, etc., etc., etc. Only the priest was amusing. He talked about S. Brian Wilson, the U. S. peace activist who got run over by a munitions train. "I wish the peace groups in the United States would also demonstrate in Red Square," said the priest, "and see if they don't run a train through there."
At least the priest had been an anti-Somoza fighter. He had a couple big scars across his skull, courtesy of Somoza's National Guard. The Sandys did fight Somoza. You can't take that away from them. After forty-five years of the Somoza family's sordid bloodsucking and murderous buffoonery, it was the Sandinista front, not the civil opposition, who pulled the plug. And in 1980, when Anastasio Somoza had bolted and was living the life of a rich swine in Paraguay, it was probably a Sandinista operative who put a bazooka shell through the window of his armor-plated Mercedes limousine and sent the fat bastard to hell in small pieces. But it's one thing to burn down the shit house and another thing entirely to install plumbing.
The real argument against the Sandinistas isn't made by the civil opposition or the human-rights do-gooders, much less by the contras or Ollie North or the Great Communicator his own dumb self. The real argument is made by invisible chickens. There are no chickens, no chickens at all in the Eastern market, the largest market in Managua.
It doesn't matter what kind of awfulness happens in Latin America-and practically every kind of awfulness does-there are always chickens. No Peruvian mountain village is so poor that you can drive through it without running over a chicken. No Mexico City slum is so urban but dawn comes in with rooster crows as loud as Los Lobos live in your breakfast nook. No oppression is so thoroughgoing that there's not a cockfight on Sunday with the loser fried up, muy gusto!, with the feet still on. But there were no chickens in Managua.
And there was plenty of nothing else besides. In the vast market sheds, the government-allotted stalls with governmentdetermined prices were empty. In the spaces between the sheds vendors had set up illegally with scanty piles of bruised fruit and little heaps of rice and maize. Every now and then, the vendors said, officials from the Interior Ministry cleared them out. For misunderstanding the Labor Theory of Value chapter in Das Ka- pital, I guess. Some people had tried to make something, anything, to sell-crude kitchen utensils pounded out of old tin, charcoal braizers made from cut-down mortar-shell cases, lumpy toys hacked from palm wood and pathetic clay whistles in the shape of birds, colored with something cheap and greasy that came off on my hands. Others displayed rags and old clothes that might as well have been rags. Many black marketeers really had nothing for sale. Spread on the ground in front of them would be a dozen washers, some screws and a broken light socket. Yet there was plenty of money visible, fists-full of bank notes, which the dispirited crowd handled like so much toilet paper. I take that back. There's a shortage of toilet paper.
A pretty teenage girl asked me to marry her without seeing my face. (Of course, somebody has pointed out that that's the only way a pretty girl would ask me to marry her, but even so . . . . ) I had my thumbs hooked in the back pockets of my jeans, and the girl came up behind me, tapped the little crown trademark on my budget-model Rolex and asked our translator, "Will this guy marry me?" A little later I got a rotten onion thrown at me. I wheeled around, but there was nothing to see except a crowd of impassive faces.
"What was that about?" I asked the translator.
"Oh," he said, "somebody thought you were an Interna- cionalista, one of those Americans or Europeans who come down here to help the Sandys."
If Manauga had been gloomy by night, it was positively funereal in the sunshine. There were more of the orderly, silent lines-one outside every store. The soldiers had caught that People's Republic trick of going zany when anyone takes out a camera. "Prohibido! Prohibido!" yelled some AK-waving dork when one of the StaffDel tried to take a picture of a tree in the Parco Central.
I didn't think you could wreck a Central American country. I thought they came prewrecked from the time of the fall of classical Mayan civilization in 900 A. D. I didn't think you could make things any more depressing than they are in, say, El Salvador or the slums of Colon, Panama. But the Sandinistas had done it. And the Nicaraguans were losing that big, rude, cynical Latin American laugh. They were starting to get the dry humor of perfect despair that the Poles and Czechs and Russians have. We would pass by a burned-out factory, and our driver would say, with deadpan face, "This belongs to the people now."
I decided I could learn something from the Russians myself. The Russians have been dealing with communism longer than anybody else, and they know what to do in the face of it. They get shellacked.
That night there was a dinner at the American ambassador's house. "The hell with the bunch of them," I told a deputy assistant political officer who had the misfortune to be seated next to me, "let's invade." This is called Double Foreign Policy on the Rocks.
"That's what the Sandys say we're going to do," I explained. "And that's what the peace creeps back home say we're going to do, too. So, what the hell? Sure, there'll be a worldwide outbreak of anti-Americanism. But how much more anti-Americanism can there be than what we've got already? Tell me that! And some of the Nic-os will probably bitch-complaining about Yankee imperi alists while they apply for VISA cards and open Tower Video franchises and begin eating again. But, shit, if we're going to have the Marines run U.S. foreign policy, let's do it right. Better than having them sneaking around the National Security Council and testifying in front of Congress wearing their goddamned marksmanship medals. Whaddya say?"
I don't remember exactly how the deputy assistant political officer responded, but I don't believe that he absolutely flat-out told me no.
Through Darkest America, Part
II: The 1987 ReaganlGorbachev
Summit
DECEMBER 1987
You can imagine my excitement at being right there, my personal self, intimately present at this actual moment of eventhood. There I was, eye-witnessing the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in the United States of America.
I mean I watched it on TV-me and most of the other seven thousand reporters covering this combined summit conference, missile kissoff and Soviet-American love-in. There was some kind of media-pool screw-around that you had to sign up for eleven years in advance to really go to Andrews Air Force Base, or really go to the White House, or really go anywhere else. As a result, only a few hundred reporters ever laid eyes on the Big Glasnosky. The rest of us were stuck in the windowless sub-basement grand ballroom of the remarkably ugly J. W. Marriot Hotel, in the Reagan-Gorbach
ev Summit International Press Center (or "Press Pit" as it was called), where we crowded around the half dozen Sony monitors and gaped at CNN. One Japanese TV crew even pointed their camera at the screen and vidoetaped the video of the occasion. So-in case you'd ever wondered where reporters get their news-they get it the same place the rest of us do, from television.
"Mongolian Cluster Fuck" is the technical term journalists use for a preplanned, wholly scripted, news-free event. A summit conference is as interesting as a second cousin's wedding. Some stuff goes on that we might like a peek at, but it goes on behind locked doors. What we get to see is the bride and groom walking down the aisle.
Anyway, here was Gorbachev. He's young (well, youngish) and handsome (in a Fred Mertz sort of way) and highly charismatic (by old, fat Politburo standards). He got off the plane with his wife, Raisa-who everyone agreed is very lifelike-and strolled down the red carpet pumping mitts with everybody in sight. Gorby did not kiss the ground. Otherwise, it was more or less the same arrival ceremony that the Pope got. I'm beginning to wonder about America's love affair with foreign authority figures. Did we put an ad in the newspaper or something?
Gorbachev made some VERY SIGNIFICANT REMARKS, the contents of which I'm sure I'll remember in a minute. Ditto Secretary of State George Shultz. Then the Gorber and his little Raisa Bran hopped into the hilarious Soviet Zil limousine, which looks like a double-wide Studebaker Lark, and booked.
Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather and the rest of Punditry, Inc., immediately went on the air to explain WHAT IT ALL MEANS, and I would gladly do the same except I was sick the week we studied this in journalism school.
It was to be a short visit for the G-shevs. More than four days in the U.S. and Raisa's VISA card bill would shatter the fragile Soviet economy. There was time only for a bun fight or two, a couple of fireside chats about whether the Russians should screw the Afghans or let the Afghans screw themselves, and, of course, the WE HAVE SEEN HISTORY MADE TODAY signing of the INF treaty-a treaty that makes the entire world safe for the other seven billion atomic warheads the U.S. and the Soviet Union have pointed at each other.
Only one way to cover a story like this, and make that a double, bartender, please. American Spectator reporter Andy Ferguson and I took ten or a dozen Stolichnaya practice shots at the Washington Press Club and lit out for the Vista Hotel, where more than a hundred Soviet journalists were bunked. We figured we'd join them in some tabletop cossack dancing and in singing bawdy songs and then get them to spill the beans about what they'd like to do to the Jewish reficseniks if nobody was looking.
But when Andy and I got to the Vista, somebody had shut off the funski valve. It had never occurred to us that the Kremlin's new anti-booze campaign would apply to journalists. Now, that's a human-rights violation. The commie agitprop artists were all being herded into a buffet dinner without so much as an aperitif. Andy and I tried to blend into the crowd but were given away by our neckties. The Sovs are becoming reasonably Western-looking, about like the Munsters, but they still lag in necktie technology and wear dirt-and-lint-colored polyester stripes the width of a bedspread. "No reception! Is only dinner!" said a guy in a large suit who I don't think checks spelling for Pravda. "They are only eating. Do not American reporters eat?" he joshed (a genuine example of KGB humor).
Well, in our case, actually, no. We drink. So we waited in the lobby bar. But, as soon as the buffet was over, the Soviets trooped into the hotel elevators and disappeared, sealed off by a line of U.S. marshals. Maybe they were just anxious to get back to their rooms and finish Gorbachev's hot new best-seller, Perestroika-a real page-turner with fabulous plot, deft characterizations and a surprise ending I won't reveal here.
Indeed, everybody in Washington was acting like a wet trench coat. Picture being stuck anyplace with seven thousand reporters, let alone seven thousand sober reporters telling each other WHAT IT ALL MEANS.
You can always measure how important something is sup posed to be by the amount of solemn, earnest, boring behavior it involves. I guess the INF treaty is supposed to be pretty darn important because the whole press corps was tiptoeing around D.C. like they'd just farted in church. And network talking heads were swelling with self-regard, gaining two or three suit-jacket sizes an hour. After all, if a pretty darn important thing is going on and you're someplace near it, you must be pretty darn important yourself. In case anybody missed the point, flacks were wearing their summit press-credential necklaces everywhere, too-not tucking them in a pocket as usual but letting all the little plastic cards hang outside their Burberrys like kindergartners sent home with notes to mother pinned on their snowsuits.
On the morning of THE SUMMIT: DAY TWO, Gorby was put through several kinds of pomp and circumstance on the White House lawn. Reagan was all smiles for this first Communist dictator in history to have a hug-a-bear nickname. Then the pair of them went off to "grok," or whatever superpower leaders do.
Raisa took a tour of Washington at 40 mph in a convoy of nine armored limousines-which, if you think about it, is the smart way to see an American city. (In case you've been in Antarctica or something and haven't heard enough summit trivia, Raisa's measurements are 38, 271/2, 38-this according to European television, which is the source of many of journalism's most colorful, though not necessarily truest, facts.)
Myself, I went across the street to Lafayette Park, where America's Goo-Goo Clusters and Moon Pies traditionally gather to demonstrate. Here I found Buddhist drummers who, I think, were drumming in favor of the treaty but wouldn't stop drumming long enough to say. A homosexual group demanded that leftover exmissile money go to AIDS research. Hare Krishnas were lobbying for the right to bother people in Russian airports, too. Eritreans wanted whoever it is who's in Eritrea to leave now. Some sixty peace activists seemed miffed because this arms deal came from guys in suits instead of people marching in Central Park. And one threeman organization with signs in Russian advocated the return of major-league baseball to the District of Columbia.
On the sidewalk in front of the White House, a large, angry crowd of people from places like Poland, Vietnam, the Ukraine, Afghanistan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were pointing out that the Soviets know how to cause trouble the regular way, no H-bombs required.
An even angrier crowd of Jewish activists was getting itself arrested at the Soviet Embassy. The Czars spent five centuries trying to chase the Jews out of Russia. Now the Soviets won't let them leave. This is something the Russians should just make up their minds about.
It was a bit of a shock to see the Soviet flag flying all over Washington, even though a lot of people in my family think that's what's been going on since the first FDR administration. Reagan's right-wing ex-pals were also not enthusiastic about that red dishrag. They want to know, "Is the Gipper channeling?" That is, they assume Ron is a conservative Republican, at least in this incarnation. But perhaps he's gone into a trancelike state, and creatures from the spirit world are speaking through him-Eugene McCarthy, maybe.
Such die-hard Bolshi-haters put the kibosh on a proposed Gorby address to both houses of Congress. Congress already has plenty of dumpy bald guys who hardly speak English addressing it, said the right-wingers, with some justice.
But nyet-sayers were a minority. Gorby fever raged in the capital, especially among Establishment liberal types such as the ones who fill your TV screen every night at seven. These people were tripping all over each other about how reasonable, convincing and just plain friendly Splotch-Top is. They were even praising the dread Ron for having Spot over to visit.
This was a bit of a mystery since Communists and Republicans both hate liberals. Reagan believes liberals should be deported to Russia, and Gorbachev believes they should be sent to Siberia. The two sides are in perfect agreement on this point. But you know how liberals live in the past. Maybe they think good U.S.-Soviet relations will put a stop to Hitler and Mussolini. Or maybe the liberals feel that, if we're headed into a period of economic
fuck-ups, we'd better get tight with the folks who wrote the book on fucking up economies. (Vid. Das Kapital.) Whatever, there's probably no truth in the rumors that Gorby will head the '88 Democratic presidential ticket. Constitutional difficulties about his not being born in the U.S. are one drawback, but the real problem is that Gorbachev's soft on trade sanctions and favors government deregulation of industry.
MOMENT TO REMEMBER: THE HISTORIC SIGNING came at two P. M., Tuesday, December 8. It's a straightforward deal. Reagan needs something to keep his second term from being reviewed like a Madonna movie, and Gorbachev wants to save bucks on military expenditures. The Soviets are sick of surviving on bread and lard. They'd like to have a more Westernized lifestyle with croissants and lard instead.
It seems like an all-right treaty to me. The Soviets have to give up 693 missiles, and we have to give up only 154. All the atomic warheads will be destroyed. That will create nuclear waste, which is good because, this way, even if disarmament proceeds to its logical conclusion and atomic weapons are completely eliminated, anti-nuke protestors will still have something to demonstrate against and won't be unemployed.
Holidays in Hell: Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks What's Funny About This? Page 24